LFG ORBIT: a doberman MC and a bunny philosopher drive a Tesla to Mars

A Tesla idles in a near future garage. The door opens. A glowing cyan fiber platform sits outside. The driver rolls onto it, the platform launches vertically out of the atmosphere, docks with an interplanetary shuttle, and the shuttle accelerates across the inner solar system to a horizon line of Mars. In the cockpit are two characters. OG Bobby Johnson, a doberman MC, raps the engineering. Plan 9 Glenda Bunny, the copilot, plays two roles: reverent fan (paws up "LFG" salutes and a deep bow at "Mister Musk") and cosmic philosopher (five rap bars about counting old light and being people of the stars). The contrast IS the comedy and the heart.

Watch LFG ORBIT on YouTube. The engine is open source (GPL 3.0 or later). The film is Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

The brief was simple. Take a Touch Sensitive "Pizza Guy" flavored French house track, build it in ChipForge, and let two characters fight for the pocket in different vocal registers. OG Bobby on the gritty engineering. Plan 9 on the cosmic reverence. And bookend the film with a soft pond ambient intro and a production outro in honor of Carl Sagan. Six passes from a 90 second body to a 102 second bookended ship cut.

Six versions to ship. The audio engineering and the cinematic word overlays each took a couple of iterations, and the bookend framing had to be fixed once on v6 after the bottom letterbox clipped the bunny's legs in v5.

1. The song, F minor French house with a buzzing low arp

The score is a ChipForge composition at 120 BPM in F minor, 45 bars, two drops, one breakdown. Pizza Guy DNA: filtered funk bass, off beat Rhodes chord stabs on the and of every beat, four on the floor kick, open hat shimmer offbeat. Eight channels including kick_punchy, hat (tight plus open shimmer), clap_tight, bass_funk plus bass_sub, rhodes_warm stabs on Fm9 to Bbm7 voicings, supersaw_lead with pingpong delay, pad_warm_analog, and a mellow low buzzing arp_dark.

The arp is the v3 addition that turned the track from a music bed into a head bopper. It rotates i to iv to v to i voicings (Fm to Bbm to Cm to Fm) every four bars with sub octave emphasis on every bar one and bar three downbeat so it sits low and weighty. Rhythm pattern also rotates per section: head bop 8ths in Drop 1, triplet flavored in mid Ascent, full 16th buzz at the climax, sparse offbeat in the outro. Never the same two bars in a row.

Master chain is the standard ChipForge stack: parametric EQ, gentle multiband, transient shaper, sidechain kick to bass duck, glue compressor, stereo widener, limiter at minus 0.5 dB. Clean, no tape saturation, no noise floor.

2. The rap: a doberman MC and a bunny philosopher

OG Bobby Johnson handles the verses. Eighteen hard bars across three drops and a breakdown, plus one establishing line at 0:08. Every bar follows the spit rap rules: six to twelve words, hard consonant clusters (cracked, idles, stack, drilled, drove, magnetic, catapult, glass deck), a period or em pause every two to four beats, universal themes only (no real persons named beyond the brand affiliations).

The verses cover the engineering arc:

Garage cracked. Tesla idles hot.
Personal fiber. Private dock. Skip the lot.
Stack the cars. Drive vertical. Crack the spot.
Boring drilled deep. We drive off the plot.

And the stance line that frames OG Bobby's whole worldview, dropped at the climax bar of Verse 3 over a banner framed kinetic title card:

I don't kiss the ring. I just clock the build.

Plan 9 the bunny gets two voice registers. Reverent fan chops (five total: "Thank you Elon" twice, "It is an honor", "LFG", "Mister Musk") and cosmic philosopher rap bars:

Bunny in the void. Counting old light.
People of the stars. Wake up tonight.
Time is just distance. Slow on the wing.
Galaxies hum the same wireless thing.
We were always supposed to go.

Plan 9 gets the very last word of the song, then carries the Sagan tribute in the production outro. The contrast (OG Bobby respects the engineering but won't worship the man, Plan 9 is the believer) is what gives the film its emotional shape.

3. The voices, three personas on three buses

ElevenLabs handles all three voices, each with its own FX chain so they live in different formant bands and never fight each other in the mix.

OG Bobby on og_bobby_johnson (the official Napkin Films voice, husky, tongue in cheek gangsta rap, designed for spit rap with stability 0.35 and style 0.65 at speed 1.10). Processed through a broad bandpass plus presence boost at 3.5 kHz plus an aecho plate at 40 / 95 / 160 ms taps. Sits forward in the mix, clear and gritty.

Plan 9 reverent chops on bunny_oracle (wise, slow, lots of air, stability 0.62, speed 0.88). Processed through the talkbox vocoder bus: chorus then aphaser then narrow bandpass 600 to 2800 Hz. That formant filter is the French house vocoder color and it's what makes the chops sound like Plan 9's "machine bunny" voice instead of a regular TTS line. (The ffmpeg order matters: vibrato after aphaser silences the signal entirely in this build. Cost a full pass on i_want_to_be_martian v3 to learn that.)

Plan 9 cosmic rap bars on og_glenda_bunny (Plan 9's official rap voice, fast, machine cool, stability 0.30, speed 1.15). Same character, different effect treatment. Processed through a spacious multi tap delay bus: chorus plus broader bandpass (400 to 4500 Hz) plus aecho at 120 / 280 / 500 ms. The philosophical lines float; the chops stay glued. Same voice ID, different audio space.

All three buses get sidechain ducked under the music. Music duck windows cover OG Bobby's verse pockets at 0.78 multiplier, Plan 9 cosmic pockets at 0.82, the breakdown chops at 0.84. A song forward mix profile (music base 0 dB, voice negative 2 dB) keeps the music as the main event with voices riding on top.

4. The visuals: planet pageant, kinetic typography, ECU eyes

PIL stick figure animation at 854 by 480 at 12 fps, 1080 body frames plus 144 frames of bookend (36 intro, 108 outro). No subtitles. Any on screen text is cinematic typography that lands on bar boundaries.

The film has six narrative sections with distinct visual palettes. Garage (warm tungsten). Platform (fiber neon cyan and magenta deck with a pulsing tube extending up). Ascent (blue to black atmospheric gradient with aurora curtains and a sun rising from the Earth's limb with a lens flare streak). Dock (cold deep space, shuttle approaching with engine glow, docking umbilical extending). Interplanetary (deep space with five planets: Saturn with ring particles, Jupiter with bands and the great red spot, Neptune, blue planet, approaching Mars, plus an asteroid belt and a nebula bloom). Destination (Mars on the horizon with surface detail, Phobos overhead, shuttle silhouette descending with engine plume).

Three parallax star layers. Beat tight camera shake on every kick (subtle in Drop 1, harder in Drop 2). Four layer kick rings on drops. Chromatic aberration channel offset on heavy kicks. ECU close ups on Plan 9's eyes during the three reverent chops with gold halo backdrops, reframed in v6 so the head and ears stay in frame (the v5 ECUs at scale 110-150 with hip at H over 2 pushed ears above and feet below the frame edge).

Plan 9 also gets a cosmic glow halo (glow=True on draw_plan9) for every frame he's in a rap span. The visual cue says "this bunny is on his cosmic shit right now."

Kinetic typography moments, all on bar boundaries:

• Gold "LFG" smash card on the Drop 1 kick (chromatic shimmer with magenta and cyan ghosts behind the gold)
• Cyan edged cream "STAGE 2" smash card on the Drop 2 kick
• Glowing gold serif "MISTER MUSK." with "an ode to elon" subline over the reverent ECU bow at 1:12
• Banner framed angular "I DON'T KISS THE RING." over OG Bobby's stance bar at 1:14
• News ticker scrolling along the top during the opening
• Outro card "STAGE 2 · LFG ORBIT · NAPKIN FILMS · AN ODE TO ELON" at 1:30

5. The bookends: pond ambient and a Sagan tribute

Bookending the film is the convention from bunny_in_the_cloud and the other recent Plan 9 films. A 3 second Napkin Films cold open at the front and a 9 second production outro at the back.

The intro is a "NAPKIN FILMS / organic arts llc / presents" wordmark over a mellow pond ambient bed. v5 used the stranger things cricket chirp but the user wanted something softer. v6 switched to scripts/synth_pond_ambient.py output: clean sine plus FM warble crickets layered with bass frog ribbits at irregular intervals (every 1.2 to 2.5 seconds). No bit crush, no tape saturation. Mellower and cleaner.

The outro is a 9 second cosmic tribute to Carl Sagan. Plan 9 silhouette small against a deep starfield with a soft gold nebula bloom. A single pale blue dot Earth in the corner with its label. Three reverent lines paraphrased by Plan 9 in Sagan's voice (slow, lots of air, on bunny_oracle):

We are star stuff.
The bunny carries that light.
Goodnight from the void.

Then a soft Tagalog goodbye: "Paalam." (a new foreign language for the Napkin Films catalog and a small personal note to Joshua's Filipino heritage). Cricket ambient callback under the final fade, bookending the bookend. Dedication card "IN HONOR OF DR. CARL SAGAN, 1934 TO 1996" holds throughout.

Carl Sagan was a wise human. The cosmos is bigger for having had him.

6. The pipeline: six passes, five layer mix, archive every version

The pipeline is the standard Napkin Films chain. Render scene frames in PIL. Build voice stems via ElevenLabs in three separate buses (each cached on a slug hash of the text plus persona plus emotion plus intensity, so re runs cost nothing). Synthesize SFX via numpy (no samples). Render the ChipForge score via the sibling repo. Final mix with ffmpeg in a five layer amix (music plus rap plus chops plus cosmic rap plus sfx) with sidechain duck windows and a song forward profile.

Every version archives to output/films/lfg_orbit/v<N>.mp4 so v1 through v6 all coexist for A/B comparison. Stems hardlink into output/working/lfg_orbit/v<N>/ for re editing. Verification runs after every mix: audio integrity, duration check, per beat audibility against the manifest, fade out timing. v6 passed 38 of 38 audible beats.

The pre render gate (scripts/timing_check.py) catches voice beat overlap and slide before the render kicks off so we don't waste five minutes rendering 1080 frames to discover the last beat got clipped by the fade. (Lesson from earlier films.) Future v7 will likely fold in a /verify-render skill that runs the full QC pass automatically, surfaced from the recurring friction analysis.

Cross links to other Napkin Films Plan 9 productions:

• THE INTRUDER (Plan 9 in the AWS Availability Zone)
• THROUGH ME (Plan 9 channels Watts)
• PLAN 9: EMERGE (the cyborg origin)
• BUNNY IN THE CLOUD (Plan 9 finds the data center)
• I WANT TO BE MARTIAN (the earlier Mars film)

License

This film is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0.

Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL 3.0 or later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed in source form. "Tesla," "SpaceX," "Starship," and "The Boring Company" appear under nominative fair use as cultural reference for commentary and tribute.

Plan 9 carries the light.